Book review - "Am I Made of Stardust?" by Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock

March 27, 2025

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We are made of star-stuff. Carl Sagan

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It looks like the great Carl Sagan answered the question in the title, but this book answers many more questions than that. In fact it answers 111 questions of the type that kids ask every day.

It was Aristotle (not St Ignatius Loyola) who first said "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man", and this applies to children learning about science. Science is the greatest intellectual achievement of humanity and its job is to show us what is true. Having kids learn about science and what it does goes a long way towards inoculating them from falling into superstition and nonsense. And there's a lot of both things about. Just spend ten minutes on Facebook and someone will tell you that the world is flat, that the Earth is 6,000 years old (actually it's about 4.5 billion), that the radiation from mobile phones can cause cancer, that horse worming paste can cure COVID, that nobody has ever been to the Moon and any number of other things that have no basis in reality. Teaching children how to evaluate these claims can give them good protection against being deceived. And inquiring minds are the best sort of minds to have.

The place to start with this book is to look at the Contents page to see the range of questions being addressed, and these are just questions about space - there are countless other scientific questions, but you have to start somewhere.

None of the answers talk down to the audience, even when the subject is somewhat technical, and the explanations and answers are in plain, understandable language. You don't have to read this book from the first page onwards - the idea is to jump in anywhere to find the answer you are looking for.

The book was the winner of the 2023 Royal Society Young People's Book Prize, shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards and chosen in 2024 for the Blue Peter Book Club.

Oberon Library has a copy.

Oh, and if you think that science might be a little too much for young minds, one of the top environmental prizes at the 2024 Young Scientist Awards conducted by the Science Teachers' Association of NSW went to eight-year-old Annabelle Gervaise Woo, and in 1998 nine-year-old Emily Rosa became the youngest author to ever be published in a major scientific journal with her paper "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch" in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (Sadly, the form of medical quackery that Emily demolished in that paper is still with us, serving no purpose except to transfer money into the pockets of charlatans.)

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About the Author

From the web site of Imperial College, London: "Space scientist. Science communicator. Business founder and BBC presenter. Dame Margaret (Maggie) Aderin-Pocock is reaching for the stars - literally and metaphorically. She is widely recognised as a leader in her field and for her extensive efforts to engage the public with science." You can see a lot more here.

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